Virtually all industries are a product of their life and times or, more precisely, their history and the current economic environment within which they operate. Transportation is no exception. Significantly, both transport's history and its environment are driven by much the same fundamentals, each embodying a movement from quantity to quality. In fact, like so many other sectors of the economy, transportation is increasingly becoming a thinking person's business, with shorter technological and product life cycles, requiring increased ability to adapt quickly and flexibly.
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References
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1. Perhaps the most eloquent statement of this can be found in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
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2. The contributions of Jules Dupuit and Arthur M. Wellington come particularly to mind.
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3. Ocean shipping provides something of a modest exception in that steam in that case replaced sail rather than animal power.
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4. The only exception, and probably the very first large-scale systematic development of high-performance highways, was that of the German autobahns in the 1930s, at least partially inspired by Hitler's military aspirations.
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5. Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964).
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6. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution 1815-1860, vol. 4, The Economic History of the United States (New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1951).
